Might there be one more thing he could do?
Was it just another delusion that prisoners tell themselves to keep going, when they knew actual escape was impossible?
Either way, he had to try.
ACT FIVE
THE WEIRDEST MAGIC OF ALL
THIRTY-FIVE
“Love what she’s done with the place.” Soren felt Naomi’s arm slipping around his waist as she said the words, pulling him tight toward her.
He glanced at her and smiled and then back at the woods of the Yucatan. “I don’t know; you don’t think the flying goldfish, the water that flows uphill, and the trees that intertwine to form portals to other universes a bit much?”
She chuckled.
“And I dared her to do a Halloween makeover of the place that would scare the kids in a good way, and get her more comfortable with the creepy crawly dimension of life that she’s likely to find out in the cosmos, as a cosmic wizard. She may have tamed this world, but there are others she won’t be able to.”
“Is that where she is? Out there in the heavens somewhere, getting her freak on?” Naomi’s eyes went to the sky. “I don’t feel her; if she was anywhere on this planet, I’d sense her. Soren, you had no right to leave her on her own out there.”
“The beast thinks I coddle you all too much. She’s, in many ways, the most powerful of us all, Naomi. Someone who can manipulate, not just parts of the natural world, but all of it at once?” He made a whistling sound like the air going out of a tire. “If she’s ever to find out just what she can do, maybe she needs to get good and scared by whatever’s out there. If her conscious mind can’t accept all that she is, the way Lar’s can’t, some part of her will lash out in her defense. Besides, she’s being mothered to death like the rest of us these days by the Fenquin queen. God forbid she have one of her subjects die on her. She’ll not make that mistake again.”
Naomi cast her eyes upon him. “Is that why you left me to my fate with Cosmos?”
“Ah, the elephant in the room; I was wondering when we were going to get around to talking about it. Um…”
Naomi smiled at him. “Save yourself the squirming; I guess I bought into the no-more-coddling formula, even if I’m not so sure how I feel about that approach being used on Natura.”
He was smiling at her. He couldn’t help it; he was just that delighted to be back in her arms again. “And wipe that smile off your face,” she said. “It’s the end of the world, in case you haven’t noticed. You should be good and depressed like the rest of us.”
“When is it not the end of the world? So long as there are Victor Truman’s around, no one can get too comfortable.”
“Speaking of Victor, we kind of sidelined him. You know how he takes to that.”
“Like a tantruming child. I needed him to get all the outbursts out of his system; if he’s going to be any good to us, he’d better grow up and fast.”
“But that’s the rub, isn’t it? None of us will ever be able to grow up enough to take on the Fenquin queen—even with her helping us every step of the way.”
Soren sighed. “I’m not so sure.”
“And now who’s tilting at windmills?”
His eyes darted toward her defensively, then he returned to staring into those sum and sundry portals formed by the twisting tree trunks. “I’m going on the theory that we’re being guided by a master manipulator in the cosmos even more sophisticated than the Fenquin queen. And he or she wouldn’t have steered us along this path unless he wasn’t also giving us everything we need to navigate it. We’re missing some clue, and I think I know what it is.”
“What?”
“With each prior cosmic wizard we’ve dispatched, we’ve had to bring in an outsider, even after all our combined magics had failed to do the trick. I think that’s part of his mentoring program, whoever is preparing us to survive on the stage of cosmic wizardry. He’s about building alliances.”
“But not just with anyone. He knows we have to do more with less, that we’ll always be the underdogs. So that being the case…” She was being that voice in his head he needed to think through the problem; sometimes she could do him better than he could do him.
“Yes, who’s the one outsider this time that is the catalyst for the rest of us?”
“Cosmos.”
“You say it like I just drove a knife into your heart.”
She grunted. “No, I think we’ve learned to work together toward one another’s benefit. She’s not as altruistic as I am, but she’s not beyond accepting help either. And she has an even stronger sense of dispatching justice to bad guys than we do.”
“Yes, in our time, it’s much harder to tell the good guys from the bad, necessitating a somewhat more laissez-faire approach.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
He was stroking her upper arms; some part of him felt insecure enough to add an extra layer of manipulation. “Get her to understand there’s something in her past, or perhaps in her future. It’s the key that allows all our other magics to make a damn bit of difference against the queen.”
Naomi nodded, though she hardly needed coaching on the matter. Soren was letting his anxiety do the talking for him. “Something else.” Naomi’s eyes regained their focus again. “I suspect Cosmos was looking to possess you to hide out from whatever this truth is she couldn’t face in her lifetime. And it would make sense that it had to do with the key to this whole affair. What else could scare her so completely as to shirk a life mission she’d dedicated herself to? Or to run away from the problem in such a way that she was actually running headlong into it? You said it; she’s one for cosmic justice, like no one before her, or after.”
Naomi shivered. The more she shivered, the more Soren held her, and the more they understood the truth of what he was saying. Cosmos remaining silent on the matter just added another layer of confirmation.
“I suppose while I work on her, you’re headed off to see Victor,” Naomi said.
“The best way to get him to get over himself is to suggest there is an anti-hero even more bad-ass than him that is about to steal all his thunder.”
“Cosmos.”
“See, she’s already the solution to an age-old problem, and I’m not just referring to the Fenquin queen.”
Naomi chuckled feebly and wiped tears from her eyes. “You’re getting better at thinking your way through these impasses without me.”
“On the contrary; it was only when you put your arm around my waist and joined your heart to mine that I had an ounce of clarity on the matter. I thought we had one move left on this mental chessboard where we’re playing the white pieces against the black queen. But, as it turned out, it was the wrong move.”
“What were you contemplating?” Naomi asked.
“Using the savant’s baby as the companion for the Fenquin queen. If the savant’s awakening prompted the rising of the Fenquin queen, she, as the next generation on line, might be even better able to fill that role.”
“The one who could fill the gap of loneliness enough to get the Fenquin queen to release her grip on us? It was worth a try. Though that decision couldn’t have come easily for you; sacrificing even a single soul to her, especially across the course of eternity, just wouldn’t be right.”
“Eternity would be sufficient time for some cosmic wizard powerful enough to free her from the Fenquin queen. It might well be us returning to undo the damage we did, once we were evolved enough.”
Naomi harrumphed, as she tried to get comfortable with the idea; even now that it was completely academic, her discomfort with the approach caused her body to stiffen. “I’m glad we found a better way.”
“We hope we found a better way.”
The sky went dark, as day gave way to night without the slightest transition. Celestial warriors were jumping through the portals created by the interlocking trees in Natura’s forest. They glowed in the dark, so the menace they represented stood out readily. There were other glow-in-the-dark cr
eatures making their presence felt—that originated on this side of the portals. They all looked creepy in the extreme.
“I may have to hand you over to Cosmos at this rate,” Naomi said. “I’m not sure my magic is any good against portal pop-through lifeforms.”
Soren smiled. “Relax. It’s Natura. She’s returned. She’s trying some of my own reverse psychology against me, goading us to get a move on. She’s chasing me off to Victor and you to Cosmos, probably so she can be free to finish her Halloween forest.”
Naomi smiled. “Our little girl is growing up.”
In the next moment, Soren and Naomi were gone. Soren was right; they all had work to do, and time was of the essence. Even Natura’s little theme park she was creating for the children for Halloween—it was just another way of preparing her own mind for the next jaunt into the cosmos; a way of integrating the child in her with the mother and adult in her more completely, a process that had no doubt started off-world, but would run its course here—in her own womb world that had all along been designed to gestate her consciousness to higher and higher levels.
THIRTY-SIX
Soren stepped through a portal opened by his cabbalistic magic to find Victor on the other side. He was pacing his lab, his arms wrapped around himself as much for solace as out of anger and defensiveness. The flexible maroon body armoring that made up his “superhero” outfit was usually kept concealed beneath his tuxedo; but Soren couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Victor in formal attire.
A quick survey of the room revealed the savant’s baby had progressed to an incubating stage. “What’s she morphing into now?” Soren asked.
“No idea. But after your three-strike-and-we’re-out revelations, she realized any more work on the cabbalistic symbols was pointless. I’m guessing she’s incubating in response to your final move on the chessboard, to see if an adult, male version of herself, might convince the alien queen she can mate again, and fly off to spawn a new master species, and leave us downtrodden races alone.”
“She did it once before,” Soren said swimming upstream of the tone of cynicism he detected in Victor’s voice.
“Yes, well, she had the fate of her own people then to distract her from what otherwise would have been a fairly superficial ruse on the savant’s part. Still, your idea might work.”
Soren smiled. “I notice you haven’t stopped pacing all the same.”
“This latest idea of yours, to have Cosmos find the one thing from her past that might be the key to all this… I’m running that through my bullshit detectors.”
Soren couldn’t resist another smile. “A mandala magician that can split off a problem inside a fractal mind in as many dimensions as he likes to contemplate a matter… That’s a lot of bullshit detectors, Victor, you must be concerned indeed that I’m going off half-cocked.”
“This is a Fenquin queen we’re trying to take down; I’m seeing if…”
“You’re seeing if there’s still a chance you can emerge from this drama with your reputation intact as the man to beat, now that there’s every chance of the savant’s progeny or of Cosmos upstaging you, relegating you to a tier two operator.”
Victor smiled. “I do so love to hate you. I appreciate the antagonism, lest I forget.”
“I have a better way for you to steal center stage.”
Victor, who had drifted off again, to spy the answer to his problem in one of the remote corners of his mind, refocused his eyes on Soren. “I’m listening.”
“Desperately, urgently, fervently, passionately, needily…”
Victor smiled a distorted smile that was caving under the weight of his apprehensiveness. “Don’t make me beg.”
Soren approached the workstation that was usually reserved for Aeros and Airy. “I’ve been thinking, the real problem is coming up against a mind that just has inexhaustible computing power.”
“Technically, mine does, too. I can just keep opening new limited-infinities inside my mind by warping the space-time geometries informing my biophysics.”
Soren held up his hand to stem the tide. Victor forgot sometimes that he was smarter than most everybody else, and spoke a language of mathematical physics that few understood. “Yes, but in the time it takes you to do that… But I think I have a workaround.”
Soren moved to the second work station that Ry and An usually shared. “What if you could mate your mandala magic with the cutting edge AI of the transhumanist sector?”
“An A.I. gene?” Victor sounded skeptical despite the rush of hopefulness piggybacking on the acoustic signal emanating from his lips.
“We might then be able to grow an artificial intelligence big enough to take on the Fenquin queen.”
Victor had returned to his pacing to chew on this chestnut, and now he was shaking his head. “It’ll never work. Even if it does, we’ll end up replacing one overlord for another. Who’s to say this super-sentience will be any less oppressive?”
“The rest of the team. I’m thinking if triad magic did so much for us…” Soren cast his gaze on the incubating savant child.
Victor nodded. “You want to coax the Fenquin queen into a ménage-a-trois with the savant child and the AI with its genetic algorithms I’ve yet to write mated to my mandala magic, as a way of bootstrapping another generation of progeny.”
“Maybe she doesn’t need them to drop her eggs in any biological sense we understand. But she might need their undying devotion and focus on her, and their minds might need to be big enough to convince her that such devotion is warranted. Think how much better you do with me bolstering your ego?”
Victor smiled at the dig. “Maybe. It might just work. It’s just the broad brush strokes of a plan, mind you. The rest of the team—myself included—will have to fill in the blanks.”
“I suggest we get to it. Once that A.I. gene is set loose on the world, it’s not going to take long to swell into a superintelligence to rival the Fenquin queen’s.”
“You think? The transhumanists have long argued that the first super-intelligence like this to arrive on the scene… Well, once it does, nothing else can ever catch up. As the Fenquin-queen herself seems to be a living testament to.”
“We just have to believe the cosmos is big enough to entertain more than one of those things. And if this one has gone to these extremes just to combat its loneliness, that suggests to me that the others are very live and let live when it comes to encountering other supersentiences that alone can shine lights in the darkness of existence bright enough to give it hope.”
“That’s a lot of hope riding on a lot of what-ifs and blind optimism.”
“It’s how I roll.”
Victor snorted. “Fine, I’ll play along, but only because you’re right, nothing any of you do will amount to a damn bit of good without me, and my piece is the most important.”
“I knew I could count on your megalomania.”
Victor smiled despite himself. “You’re leaving already?” Victor said, reaching out to him as Soren started fading from the stage. Soren thought he’d leave him a parting reminder of just how lonely it was at the top. Victor would always need humbling; forgetting as much could cost them everything.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Soren wondered about his own role in things. The fact was that the project embarked upon by the blind huntresses and Augustus was valid—oversoul access would give them very possibly the powers and insights needed to throw off the influence of the Fenquin queen. But ironically, there was no crash course in how to do that—short of subjecting themselves even more completely to the Fenquin queen’s control.
There might be an out: some very weird magic he and the beast might be able to procure together.
But before that fusion reaction could take place, Soren needed Lar. It was Lar’s bungling that had released the cabbalistic magic into Soren in the first place that ironically had allowed Soren and the beast to finally accommodate one another, to share the same body. Since then, Lar had managed to turn
his bungling nature into a kind of superpower via his Captain Klutz alter-ego. But Soren was going to need all three aspects of Lar; that also included Cypher. Cypher would be needed to make sense of the book on the bookshelf against the wall with the answers—answers that Soren had brought back into this time from his many forays into netherworlds when he drifted in his Samadhi tank of sorts in his lab.
Soren teleported into the basement of his building in the Victorian London district of Syracuse, New York. Ironically, the only time he’d left his house, of late, was to leave the planet; all his time in the “Yucatan Peninsula,” he was truly inside his lab, in the section of the basement he utilized, adjoining Lar’s subterranean home.
Lar spooked upon pulling a book off his bookshelf and turning back to his desk only to find Soren blocking his path. “Yikes!” He stared at Soren and read the intensity on his face fairly accurately. “Which of my alters do you need access to?”
“All of them.”
“Impossible. It’s one at a time or nothing.”
“I need Captain Klutz to find the book on the shelf that I stole from another place in time that shows us the light at the end of the tunnel we’re in now. I need Cypher to decode the book which will surely contain futuristic tech that will be unfathomable otherwise. And I need you to give enough of a damn to summon the other two.”
“How do you know that you have a solution to our current situation, arrived at, mind you, well ahead of the problem?”
“I don’t, but that’s how it worked out last time, didn’t it? I’m hoping the person guiding me on those time traveling journeys was none other than the master manipulator guiding us all out of the present into the future. The entity that, for whatever reason, is beefing up his allotment of cosmic wizards to serve in some capacity.”
“You think it’s something like what Cosmos is up to as a CSA agent? Why else would she be drawn to us? Yes, Naomi had me looped in to your mind with that way she has of connecting people psychically.”
Reawakened Page 24
